Faith schools, integration and social mobility

Categories: Latest News
Friday January 02 2015
Muslim schools seem to be back in the news with the Independent front page yesterday featuring an interview with the chair of the Social Integration Commission, Matthew Taylor, discussing the commission’s most recent report, ‘Social integration: a wake-up call’.
Taylor talks about the commission’s survey and findings on levels of trust between different groups in society, the cost to the economy of low levels of integration and social mobility and positive interventions that can help the process of integration to the benefit of society and economy.
Among issues Taylor touches on is the role of schools in facilitating contact and trust between different groups arguing that while universities were faring better in terms of bringing ethnic groups together, policy in relation to schools suffered from a “a certain amount of carelessness”.
Taylor remarks on faith schools in general, and the Coalition’s free schools policy, with the Independent reporting that “Muslim faith schools were singled out by Mr Taylor as having a particular problem.”
Taylor told the paper, “We have to recognise that Muslim faith schools seem to be much more monocultural than Catholic faith schools or Church of England faith schools.”
He added, “It’s a very difficult policy because if you have Catholic and Church of England faith schools you can’t really deny the need for Muslim faith schools, but there is a different character, they tend to be much less diverse.”
The Daily Mail repeats aspects of the Independent interview emphasising and aggrandising Taylor’s comments about Muslim schools under the headline, “Muslim faith schools are causing serious divisions in society because of their lack of diversity warns top equality campaigner.”
While Muslim schools have come under remarkable pressure and scrutiny on the back of the so-called Trojan horse plot in Birmingham, there are a number of contextual factors that are absent in the newspaper reports which have an important bearing on the debate.
For example, the Daily Mail suggests that Muslim schools “are causing serious divisions in society”, wholly ignoring the question of scale. The number of state-maintained Muslim faith schools in the UK as a proportion of the total number of faith schools is 0.06%, or 12 schools, compared to the 6,751 Christian faith schools (from figures compiled under a 2012 FOI request). It is quite a feat to place “serious divisions in society” at the door of 12 schools.
Secondly, given that faith schools by their definition attract members of a particular faith community, it is inevitable given the large number of Asians as a proportion of British Muslims that Muslim faith schools would reflect this ethnic representation. According to the 2011 census, although British Muslims are more ethnically diverse than all other religious groups, 68% of Muslims in England and Wales are of Asian ethnicity. Muslim faith schools being predominantly “monocultural” is therefore merely a consequence of this fact.
Moreover, the admissions process for faith schools has come under considerable scrutiny following parental and sectorcomplaints about selective admissions criteria employed by faith schools in order to maintain a certain socio-economic profile among its pupil population. It would seem the poor integration opportunities afforded by the school system is more widespread and certainly implicates more faith schools in the UK than just the Muslim cohort.
At a time when a third of Britons freely admit to harbouring racial prejudice and anti-Muslim discourse in the education sector is rife, one would hope journalists writing about Muslim faith schools would take care to present information in a more comprehensive fashion and pay attention to detail to avoid stoking social tensions through irresponsible reporting.